Newsweek piece on the Global Warming "Denial Machine"

Some of you may have seen this already, but Newsweek's cover story this week was about the ever so well-funded global warming deniers like oil cronies (and not to mention blowhards like Rush who maintains that global arming is a "hoax").
I don't know what's worse, those morons who can't see that global warming is a reality, or those who know it is but deny it for their own potential benefit.

The worst part is that as global warming becomes more of an everyday reality, the denials just get louder.

"A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."

Fenian, you know as well as I do that you can follow the money to some of the people shouting loudest from the mountaintops that global warming has doomed the planet. I certainly believe global warming exists, but I don't believe modern man is strictly the reason. And I also don't believe it's as bad as some make it out to be. There's middle ground on this issue, as it is with every other big issue. You're intelligent enough to realize thatt. Everthing doesn't always have to be one end of the spectrum vs. the other. Of course, it's hard to see that when you're on one of those ends.

EDIT: jg, a serious question, do you think Kyoto, as it was written, would have been workable in a country with the size, population and production needs of the United States?

Here is an interesting article about a scientist who has calculated that it's better for the Environment to drive to store instead of walking.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. â€œDriving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,â€ he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. â€œIf you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

â€œThe troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.â€

Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.